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Retrieving Customary Web Language to Assist Writers

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Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5993))

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Abstract

This paper introduces Netspeak, a Web service which assists writers in finding adequate expressions. To provide statistically relevant suggestions, the service indexes more than 1.8 billion n-grams, n ≤ 5, along with their occurrence frequencies on the Web. If in doubt about a wording, a user can specify a query that has wildcards inserted at those positions where she feels uncertain.

Queries define patterns for which a ranked list of matching n-grams along with usage examples are retrieved. The ranking reflects the occurrence frequencies of the n-grams and informs about both absolute and relative usage. Given this choice of customary wordings, one can easily select the most appropriate. Especially second-language speakers can learn about style conventions and language usage.

To guarantee response times within milliseconds we have developed an index that considers occurrence probabilities, allowing for a biased sampling during retrieval. Our analysis shows that the extreme speedup obtained with this strategy (factor 68) comes without significant loss in retrieval quality.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany

    Benno Stein, Martin Potthast & Martin Trenkmann

Authors
  1. Benno Stein
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  2. Martin Potthast
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  3. Martin Trenkmann
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Adaptive Information Cluster, Dublin City University, Dublin, 9, Ireland

    Cathal Gurrin

  2. The Open University, Walton Hall, MK7 6HF, Milton Keynes, UK

    Yulan He

  3. Microsoft Research Ltd, 7 JJ Thomson Avenue, CB3 0FB, Cambridge, UK

    Gabriella Kazai

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, CO4 3SQ, Colchester, UK

    Udo Kruschwitz

  5. The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK

    Suzanne Little

  6. University of London, London, UK

    Thomas Roelleke

  7. Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, MK7 6AA, Milton Keynes, UK

    Stefan Rüger

  8. Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, 17 Lilybank Gardens, G12 8QQ, Glasgow, UK

    Keith van Rijsbergen

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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Stein, B., Potthast, M., Trenkmann, M. (2010). Retrieving Customary Web Language to Assist Writers. In: Gurrin, C., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5993. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12275-0_64

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12275-0_64

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12274-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12275-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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